Can We Break the Cycle of Military Sexual Violence Scandals?

Last week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta lifted the ban preventing female soldiers from officially serving in combat -- a decision that raised the urgency on efforts to address the festering crisis of sexual assault within the U.S. military. That crisis -- which claimed more than 50 victims of sexual assault a day in the latest year of Defense Department data -- is the subject of the Oscar-nominated 2012 documentary Invisible War. In this series, The Huffington Post invites victims and advocates to speak out about sexual assault in the military.

"When someone in the military is injured on duty, they're a hero and people shake their hands. I was injured too, but I'm treated like it was my fault. I didn't join the military to get raped, I wanted to serve my country too and I did for nearly two years," Kori Cioca told me during an interview.

She's faced intense retaliation and upheaval in her life for exposing a crime that affects as many as one third of women and 1 percent of men in the armed forces. A recent study by the Department of Veterans Affairs found that about half of women sent to Iraq or Afghanistan report being sexually harassed, and nearly one in four say they were sexually assaulted.

Most incidents are never reported, in part because soldiers have to report to their chain of command and that could include the rapist or his friends. In Cioca's case, the person she reported initial harassment to was a drinking buddy of the alleged rapists, so he did not help her. Soon the harasser allegedly escalated to rape. Afterward, he claimed it was consensual sex and his punishment was only a minor loss of pay and being forced to stay on the base for 30 days. For her punishment, Cioca was given janitorial duties. Because she was upset and afraid, she was also forced to undergo a mental evaluation.

She said, "The tests showed I was mentally sound and one of the women who saw me and found out what happened got me out of there. Just shy of two years of service, I was discharged with honorable misconduct in 2007 and I didn't make the GI Bill qualifications."

That same woman told her about the 1991 Tailhook scandal and suggested she find a lawyer. Fortunately, lawyer Susan Burke found her, and when Cioca discovered she was just one of tens of thousands of soldiers who have been raped by their comrades, she agreed to join a class action lawsuit to hold the military responsible.

"In the Coast Guard, you learn to fight for just causes and to stand up and be proud," she told me. "I want to try to be strong enough for other people. It's awful thinking about people in the military who are currently going through what I went through. I want to change that."

At the hearings, the military said they have instituted many new training and prevention programs. Good. They also said they do not want to change the reporting or prosecuting process, which means commanders continue to have all the power, even though they are not impartial judges, and they may even be the assailants. Bad.

If survivors still face barriers to reporting, if alleged rapists likely face little punishment, and if commanders have so much power, what changes?

In the 22 years since the Tailhook scandal, we have witnessed a cycle: scandals of sexual violence within the military, the revelation of abuse of power, and then congressional hearings during which the military promises to do better. Rinse and repeat.

How many more years will this continue? Our military members deserve so much better.

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With the purpose of writing about true crime in an authoritative, fact-based manner, veteran journalists J. J. Maloney and J. Patrick O’Connor launched Crime Magazine in November of 1998.

Their goal was to cover all aspects of true crime: from organized crime to serial killers, from capital punishment to prisons, from historical crimes to celebrity crime, from assassinations to government corruption, from justice issues to innocent cases, from crime films to books about crime. Read More